


throw me to the wolves

by incendir



Category: Block B, Winner (Band)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-07
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-06-23 11:10:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15605007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incendir/pseuds/incendir
Summary: Part ofthis AU





	throw me to the wolves

**Author's Note:**

> Part of [this AU](https://twitter.com/_92914/status/1026549888614457344)

Jiho has nightmares sometimes.

Recently, they’ve worsened because now, the faceless young man who would always end the dream—who would always be the reason Jiho would wake up, guilt and regret pumping through his veins alongside his blood, covered in sweat and shivering with anxiety—now that young man has a face. 

The nightmare is always the same one, and it always begins the same way. Even though the memory is from long, long ago, Jiho sees himself in it as he is now. The boy beside him, however, the boy playing with him remains as he was in Jiho’s memory. Even after Jiho knows what the boy looks like, thirteen years from that day, when Jiho’s nightmare begins, the boy is still a boy. 

Jiho thinks that perhaps the worst part of the nightmare is how it always begins. It’s worse, he thinks, when nightmares disguise themselves as sweet dreams and when one is never lucid enough to realize what it is about to become. He’s happy in the dream, at first. He’s so incredibly happy with the boy. Jiho has memorized where he lives in just the week that he’s spent coming here every single day when he can slip away from his caretakers. The boy lives in a rickety gated house, the paint peeling to reveal the metal beneath the rungs. They’d played through the rungs for a while, simply chatting and Jiho pointing at the toys the boy has in his yard. 

It’s Jiho who digs him out. 

He shifts, as easy as breathing, watches the boy look scared for a moment, backing away from the gate as Jiho paws through the dirt beneath the gate, digging a whole with his paws big enough for the boy to crawl out under. 

His first regret.

He can, after all, remember as clearly as if it was yesterday, the sound of the boy’s nervous, bright voice, “I’m not supposed to go out. My mom said it’s dangerous. There’s wolves.”

Jiho regrets. He would do anything—anything—to turn back time and listen. To be able to tell his stupid, horrible, seven-year-old self to listen. To do anything other than grin toothily back at the boy once Jiho has shifted back, to motion for him to crawl under and through. To say something other than, “I’m a wolf. I’m not dangerous, right?”

The boy’s returning smile is happy and eager, dirt staining his green jacket and in his hair, as he takes Jiho’s hand and runs with him away from the dilapidated houses, away from the gated neighborhoods—towards the surrounding forest.

His second regret comes when his ears, far more sensitive than the boy’s—more than any human’s—pick up twigs breaking in a way that is too conspicuous for it to have been beneath the feet of any small, forest critter. He hears it and ignores it, too immersed, too busy enjoying playing with the other boy. Jiho knows he has an older brother—somewhere—has seen him during short holidays when he’s allowed to return home to his parents, but other than that, his time is spent playing only with the other kids at the Academy.

He has fun with them, he loves all of them, but he has fun with this boy, too. He wishes they could go back together. 

His third regret is when he smells the unmistakable scent of danger too close to both of them, when he hears a soft, triumphant snarl—when he meets the boy’s eyes as they both hear this time the low voice of a grown man just beyond the gathering of trees, “Little shifter—little wolf—I know you’re there.” 

He should have told the boy to run, right then. He should’ve told the boy that Jiho would distract the werewolf, and the boy can run. Humans are slow—so slow, and so fragile, and human children even more so. The boy would’ve needed the head start, would’ve needed any and all the time Jiho could have bought him. 

“Hyung, hide,” the boy whispers, yanking Jiho down by his scarf. They lie down, flat on their stomachs, behind a fallen tree, the rough dried leaves on the ground scratching their chins and cheeks. 

“Little shifter, you don’t need to be scared,” the werewolf says smoothly. Jiho closes his eyes. He feels like vomiting. The man is close—so close. Jiho hears the footsteps like sirens. “I’m kind to children—so long as you stop hiding first.”

Jiho knows—he knew, right at that time, that the werewolf only thought there was one boy. He thought there was only Jiho, the scent of a wolf-shifter so strong that it overpowered the scent of the human boy beside him. Jiho could have saved him—if Jiho was bitten, worst came to worst, he would rage with a burning fever, with a horrible rash, for some days, but he would live and he would heal. His life would not change.

But Jiho was scared. He _ is _ scared. He’s so scared.

“Hyung, I think we have to run,” the boy whispers, while Jiho has still said nothing. It’s laughable that he still calls Jiho  _ hyung _ . “Hyung, run, okay? I’ll run, too. Run.  _ Run _ .”

He runs—his last regret. 

He stands at the same time the boy does. Jiho shifts and runs—as fast as his four legs will carry him, faster without a doubt than a young, human child, and he runs without stopping all the way through the forest. He runs through the neighborhood, ignoring the exclamations of the humans who are walking on the sidewalks, ignoring the shouts of shock at the sight of a wolf cub running through the streets of clearly human territory. 

With the early versions of the nightmare, Jiho would wake at this point—gasping for air and shaking violently, a silent scream poised on his lips. As more years passed, as more sleepless nights passed, as Jiho searched institution after institution—as he became too familiar with the possible reality the boy faced if he had not died from blood loss when he was bitten—the nightmares took on a longer, different ending.

Until the beginning of this summer, Jiho would not wake until he was sitting in the visitation room at an institution—the sights and sounds and smells of what the inside of one was like come to life now. He would always be facing a young man around his own age, face too shadowed by darkness and dim lights to make out because Jiho didn’t know what the boy would look like now—thirteen years later. 

“It’s your fault,” the young man says, voice as vague as his face, throat surrounded by the bulky, rudimentary wolfsbane collar—resembling a neck brace far more than an actual collar—heavy, impeding, suffocating. “Hyung, it’s your fault. That’s all shifters do, isn’t it, though? They take what they want, and then they leave you to die. They destroy lives. Did you sleep well that night, hyung? Did you sleep well every night after that? Did you sleep well after taking my life away from me?”

Sometimes Jiho will wake then—those are the good nights. 

Sometimes he wakes up, dry-heaving, so nauseous that he grips the edge of the bed, ready to vomit onto the floor—those nights are the nights the dream went on even longer, the nights he sees the young man injected to death before his very eyes by guards. 

He wakes up now, bright and early at four in the morning, feeling like his insides are trying to crawl out of his body up his throat. He’d watched the young man die—it becomes worse and worse every night because the young man has a face now, he has a voice and a smile and mannerisms and life. 

Jiho thinks it probably doesn’t help much that he isn’t even in his own bedroom. Instead, he is in a room with possibly less personality than that of a hospital room, and only slightly more personality than a human prison cell. The Institution has what they  _ refer to _ a hotel for visiting relatives and friends of werewolves, but Jiho has seen rooms at the Academy’s Infirmary with more life than these. It’s the only place for non-wolves to reside in overnight on the island, however, meaning Jiho has become exceedingly familiar with the building, spending summer after summer each year here since he’d turned fifteen.

The Academy allowed carnivores of certain classes to partake in programs on the Institution over summer so long as they also fulfilled at least five hunt missions a year—whether or not the hunts resulted in catches was irrelevant, the requirement was simply the participation. Jiho has completed ten every year—all resulting in catches as well, for good measure—just to make sure that the Academy wouldn’t have anything to say about one of their most elite wolves spending every single summer since he finished his lower education at an island of prisons. 

Jiho swings his legs over the edge of the bed and heads for the shower with the hopeless hope that hot water could wash off some of the terror—enough, at least, for him to pull himself together for the day. 

He pulls on shifter casuals over his phase-suit, the Institution required humans to be in business casual at the least and for shifters to be wearing something indicative of their status so that guards would be able to differentiate them at first glance along with checking the existence of a phaseband. Jiho had only brought five pairs of black casuals, alternating them through the week until he sent them to the hotel laundry service over the weekend. Only relatives are permitted on weekends and holidays for visitation. 

On the way to the door, he stops at the small, closet space, hovering his phaseband over the tiny screen of the sizable, dark glass safe that came a required feature of every hotel room. The door unlocks soundlessly, and Jiho pulls it open, reaching in to take one of the black marbles inside—there are five left, and there are four days left for him on the island.

He presses it against the underside of his phaseband, letting it melt into the metal, before closing the safe again and leaving his room.

 

* * *

  
  
The Eighth West Institution is the last stop on the shuttle course—furthest from the hotel, and from the small block of convenience stores and guards’ quarters that surround the hotel. It also means that if Jiho catches the shuttle at nine, he won’t arrive to the institution until forty minutes past, and by the time he’s gotten through all the rounds of security, it will be at least quarter past ten. He’s right on time today, though, most probably on account of his nightmare waking him up even earlier than usual.

Last weekend, he had gone all the way back to Seoul to pick up a jar of the specific type of lollipops he had raved about the week before. He’d searched high and low at every convenience store on the island but, as expected, they only sold essentials or basic luxuries that relatives might want to buy and bring for the inmates. Jiho holds the jar in his lap now, filled to the brim with lollipops he hasn’t eaten since he was a child. 

Security is faster than usual on the weekdays since relatives mostly reserve their visits for the weekend since they have those privileges anyway. Jiho doesn’t have to wait long in general comparatively, as they have a separate check for shifters and for the summer, consistently, it has only been him. At the beginning of June, when he first arrived, he arrived with a few other shifters from the Academy, but they returned at the end of the month, and now only he remained.

The guard who leads him from the security checkpoint at the entrance through the labyrinth of dark halls changes every visit, but the guard who receives him at the door of the innermost wing—the highest security wing—is the same male human every time. Jiho waits until they are out of earshot, until they have entered the wing and the gates have closed, to slip the black marble from his phaseband—the tiny sphere forming out of the band first in a teardrop and then taking shape into Jiho’s fingers as a perfect ball. He hands it over to the guard. “There’s six-hundred on that one,” he says stonily. “I want ninety minutes, glass down, cameras off.”

The human tucks the marble into a tight pocket on the front of his uniform vest. He raises his eyebrows up at Jiho—the man is two heads shorter than him and, much more afraid of Jiho than he would like to let on. The scent of fear always surrounds him when he is near Jiho. “Everything’s going to come back on at ninety minutes on the dot,” the human says, checking his wristband for the time. “Starts now.”

Jiho hears the door of the individual visitation room for that cell click open. He steps in as the doors part, watches the glass partition slide down into the table as he takes his seat, and places the jar of lollipops between them. 

Minho smiles—deep, dark shadows beneath his crinkling eyes, cheeks hollow and hair matted, choppily cut around his face. His hands are dry and bony, scarred as is the skin that peeks out from beneath the bulky, metal brace around his neck—red lights on and blinking constantly. “Hyung,” he says, voice as tired as he looks, but cheerful—always cheerful.

Jiho tries to smile back. “Hi, Minho.”


End file.
